Tell me about ADVANCED audio engineering. (mixing)

[Rainman]

I write and record all of my own music. Every instrument, and I record it all in my basement. No help whatsoever. It's recently dawned on me that the sound quality of some of my music could be a lot better than it is. I want to know if anyone knows how to get a better mix using EQ and compression, and which types of EQ (graphic, visual, parametric) and which types of compression (like multiband compression) to use. I'm not a noob to audio engineering, I am just not advanced. I wonder if someone else advanced could help me get a better mix on my tracks. Equipment, Shure 58 dynamic microphones, mac book pro computer running Garageband 4.1 (and yes, Garageband can be used for professional quality sound mixes, provided that you master in a program like logic) I'm using an Alesis usb 8 multimix hardware mixer. I am having problems with masking. Any help would be awesome.

[Ynot]

probably the easiest way to up the quality in general is to record at higher sample rates Record all audio at 96 KHz or higher do all processing at this sampling rate then the last thing you do is downsample to 48 KHz (DVD audio quality) or 44.1 KHz (CD audio quality)

[Rainman]

That's something that never even crossed my mind.. but sadly I'm not sure how to do that in G band.. maybe I do need to use a better sequencer.

[lysergic]

you need a much better sequencer than g-band. try albeton live or logic by mac. cubase is also good. i do not recommend protools because you have to get specific equipment to work with it. i like visual eq's. but every person you talk to will tell you to do it differently. the best bet is to skip the bull shit and fuck with it until you figure out what works for you. best of luck. i'm in a situation very similar to yours so i have the utmost sympathy. studio sound quality is hard to achieve in the basement, but not unheard of so it isn't impossible by any means.

[Rainman]

I'm slowly getting there... that sucks about garage band. A producer who goes by "Tweak" has a site called tweakheadz.com where he reviewed garageband and said it was good as long as it was ultimately bounced or imported into logic for mixing touchups and to begin mastering. And about EQ, I just don't know the difference between visual, graphic, and parametric.

[AURON]

parametric is what you do after regular eqing....it's like for fine tuning frequencies inside a certain sound. like you can boost frequencies around 1khz or you can boost low frequencies while inserting a filter....and I think visual eq is just something like cool edit or sound forge....i could be wrong